Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, center left, and son Eric Trump walk near the first hole during the final round of LIV Golf Miami, at Trump National Doral Golf Club, Sunday, April 7, 2024, in Doral, Fla. Pictured in background center is valet Walt Nauta. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
The Special Counsel’s Office on Friday urged the Mar-a-Lago judge to neither throw out the case against former President Donald Trump’s valet and co-defendant nor allow Walt Nauta to pursue discovery based on claims, “without merit,” that prosecutors are treating him differently from similarly situated witnesses and with vindictiveness or “animus” towards him.
Special counsel Jack Smith first dismantled Nauta’s assertion that two uncharged Mar-a-Lago employees, identified only as Persons 10 and 11, were selectively treated as helpful to the prosecution while he was charged with crimes over his “surreptitious box movement,” which allegedly occurred before a Trump lawyer searched for classified documents that the government was seeking to recover from a storage room in June 2022.
In August 2023, the special counsel revealed that Trump Employee 4, the IT director at Mar-a-Lago, had “implicated” Trump, Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira “in efforts to delete security camera footage,” footage that the government said supported its obstruction case against Trump and his “body man” Nauta for allegedly concealing boxes of documents from the Trump lawyer before that attorney’s storage room search.
The IT director, Smith said, was first represented by Nauta’s lawyer Stanley Woodward, but when the prosecution raised perjury concerns, Trump Employee 4 got a new lawyer and “retracted his prior false testimony.”
In the special counsel’s latest filing, the Mar-a-Lago IT director, Person 10, and Person 11 each factored into the rebuttal of Nauta’s selective prosecution claims — to show that there’s no legitimate comparison between Nauta’s situation and theirs.
“Shortly before Trump’s lawyer arrived at Mar-a-Lago to review boxes in the storage room for documents responsive to the subpoena, Nauta and codefendant Carlos De Oliveira moved approximately 30 boxes into the storage room. When the lawyer arrived, Nauta escorted the lawyer to the storage room to review the boxes,” Smith recounted. “After Trump learned about the grand jury subpoena for security footage from Mar-a-Lago, which would show the box movement, Trump asked to see Nauta, and Nauta then abruptly changed his travel plans and flew to Mar-a-Lago. While there, he coordinated with codefendant Carlos De Oliveira, who approached the Director of Information Technology at Mar-a-Lago and told him that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.”
Next, Nauta allegedly lied to the FBI about his knowledge of the boxes at issue and allegedly lied to the grand jury about “surreptitious box movement” caught on video that the government accused him of trying to delete at Trump’s behest.
“Although he was asked whether he had removed anything from the storage room, he did not inform the grand jury that he had removed approximately 60 boxes between May 24 and June 1, 2022,” Smith said. “As a result, the Government did not discover Nauta’s surreptitious box movement until later, when it obtained security camera footage showing his conduct.”
Nauta attempted to argue that, like him, Person 10 and Person 11, moved a box out of the storage room before the attorney search, and yet they faced no charges.
But Smith responded the situations were “not remotely comparable.”
While Nauta is accused of moving five dozen boxes out of storage, Persons 10 and 11 only moved one box — a box which that was returned a Mar-a-Lago before the Trump attorney search upon the realization that maybe that would be the most “prudent” course of action.
As it turned out, there were classified documents inside the box, Smith said.
“As a result, the next day, they brought the box back to the office from the trunk of the car, where it had remained overnight,” the filing said. “Trump’s lawyers subsequently search the office and found documents with classification markings in the box, which they produced to the Government.”
Smith added that while Nauta “moved scores of boxes out of the storage room before Trump’s attorney conducted a search for responsive documents in the storage room, in order to keep the boxes away from so he did not search them,” Persons 10 and 11 “moved a single box back into the office—with no involvement from Trump—to ensure that Trump’s attorneys would have access to the box.”
Smith separately attacked Nauta’s argument that his “conversation over coffee with a prosecutor” established he was charged in retaliation — for declining to cooperate in the probe and refusing to testify before the grand jury after receiving a target letter.
In late March, Smith called the claims “meritless” and “deeply flawed.”
The latest filing said that accepting Nauta’s complaints about receiving a target letter and later facing charges when he did not testify would create an untenable immunity loophole for defendants. Smith urged U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon not sign off on a motion offering “nothing but speculation and innuendo.”
“If such circumstances were to raise a presumption of vindictiveness, a putative defendant who received a target letter could effectively immunize himself by declining to respond,” Smith said. “A presumption of prejudice in those circumstances would be unprecedented and would effectively preclude the issuance of target letters, which are routine and intended to benefit putative defendants.”
Read the special counsel’s latest response here.
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